Literature Glossary

Don’t be an oxymoron. Know your literary terms.

Genre

Definition:

Genre. Say it out loud. Sounds fancy, right? Well, it's not. It really just means "kind" in French. And that's exactly what genre is: a kind. In our case, a kind of literature.

What's in a genre, you ask? Just a pile of conventions. Different combinations of conventions—ranging from style, tone, character development, setting, and beyond—make for some crazy genres. Some of them even have funny names:

Ergodic literature

Space opera

Luciferian literature

Splatterpunk

Techno-thriller

And then there are the ones that are more likely to show up on your summer reading list: